Using archival footage and specially shot interviews with major filmmakers and actors, director Stanley Kwan constructs a visual essay that attempts to demonstrate that queerness has existed in Chinese cinema since its very earliest movies. He argues that China has provocatively dealt with questions of gender and sexuality in cinema, in spite of social conservatism and government censorship. Chia-Chi Wu writes, "In its queering of Chinese-language film– reclaiming or recreating Chinese texts for queer interpretation – Yang±Yin undercuts heteronormativity and patriarchy foundational to nationalist discourses of Chinese communities and creates a queer imaginary that is ‘pan-Chinese’."

Kwan draws attention to the coded or subtle queerness of Chinese cinema. For example, director Zhang Che describes "possible 'Freudian' readings" of his film The Slaughter In Xi'an (1990), thus, according to Fran Martin, "validating the power of the spectators agency and never denying the erotic tensions bubbling beneath supposedly chaste canons of Confuscian…